The jet lag effect kicked us out of the bed around 6 in the morning, so after a so called “continental” breakfast we had a walk through the town to the beach. lather the weather became cloudy, so we headed back to the hotel to work on our presentation. Sandro tried to finish e white paper and finally we tried to sharpen our elevator pitch. At 7 p.m. we headed to the Monterey Aquarium, were the formal greeting reception took place. So we had plenty time for a first networking.

On Monday I was flying from Berlin to Frankfurt to meet there my collegue Sandro (VP Marketing at Mindquarry). Together we took the Air India flight to LA. Sandro was backbiting a little bit about bloggers who often write about all the trouble happens during a flight. “There is usually trouble at almost every flight” he said. He had right. But to avoid his backbiting on me, I’ll stay quiet at that point. Perhaps Sandro will blog about the flight. 😉
Anyway, nearly everything worked out fine at the travel. The photo on the right is taken from our car at the Hwy 5 north. At that point, we just had left the LA suburban area and still 4 hours to travel to Monterey. At that time we still had not considered jet lag effects, on which we should suffering soon.
It was a hard ride to Monterey, were we arrived at half past midnight local time. We’ve been really down and happy to be able to go to bed immediately.

Collaboration is the essence of the modern business era. More and more work is information work. More and more work happens between local distributed teams. But more and more working efficiency is reduced by the increasing overhead.
The topic of „understanding performance and collaborative workspaces“ becomes significant importance to every business in our global networked world.
According to a IDC study about the hidden costs of information work, the annual costs to an Enterprise with 1.000 information workers ( / annual payment of $60,0000 each) are $30M for wasted time.
Assuming the reduction of 1/3 of the overhead by better concepts and tools for teamwork, they could save about $10M each year.
So I think, the introduction of better concepts is just a matter of time and it will happen soon.
At Mindquarry, we believe that we will play a major role in that process of changing the collaborative workspace into a better place for team workers.

On the photo you see Alex Vieux, CEO of red Herring, opening the Venture Market Europe 2007 in Cannes. He’s a remarkable experienced guy, sitting on top of an excellent network of journalists, publishers, entrepreneurs and VC’s. At that moment he was just far away.
I received together with Lars the RH 100 Europe Award for the 100 Europe Entrepreneurs with the most chance of success and had a pitch and a lot of talks to many interesting people and some investors too.

At the last day, I was standing in the floor between the conference room and the restaurant, Alex went by and started to speak to me. How I’m doing, how my plans are for Mindquarry. To my big amazement he told me that he has personal reviewed our application and he sees a great potential in Mindquarry. “Do not wait 3 years to move to the United states” was his advice, “act soon. In your business, time runs fast” He offered his support and advice when I wanted to find American investors. “Let’s stay in contact”.
Honestly, I was some moment perplex. And I was proud to and felt honored by his approval to the potential in Mindquarry.
Let’s see further steps. I’ll write about it here and here.

In spring 2006 I met Lars Trieloff, co-founder of Mindquarry for the first time. He told me his founding story, which is in a nutshell:

“When he wrote a book back in 2005 he had to team-work with publishers, proofreaders and so on. Soon he recognized that a lot of work troubles came from a lack of supporting software tools, which are on the other hand still a proven standard in the software industry. Programmers have a lot of team work and use many tools like version control for source code, issue tracking, wiki based knowledge base and smart conversation tools like icq, jabber, ichat. But nobody outside the coders community could use such complex tool sets. So he decided to develop such proven tools, but made easy usable to information workers of all kind.”